Television

Some good news on the Sunday TV front. It looks like Christiane Amanpour may be out as host of ABC's "This Week."

Considering all the talk of new technology that has passed through this site in recent years, this probably shouldn't have come as a big surprise, but I did not seen it coming:

"Starship Troopers," Paul Verhoeven's movie take on the Robert Heinlein classic, is interesting in the casual way it shows us an advance in communications technology. Though supposedly set in the far future, the TV/Internet mixutre it shows us could be from tomorrow. People watching news shows are told to "click here" if they want to know more. And it looks like tomorrow just arrived:

Nipplegate ends up being a bust:

A federal appeals court has ruled that the FCC acted improperly when it imposed a half-million dollar fine on CBS for broadcasting an image of Janet Jackson's exposed nipple for a fraction of a second during the 2004 Super Bowl. The court ruled that the broadcast was legal under the FCC's then-current policy of allowing "fleeting" indecency on the airwaves, and that it was unfair of the FCC to change the policy retroactively.

The Indianapolis Star's Matthew Tully takes a break from politics and lists 10 good things about the Colts' dismal season so far, including:

If the Indianapolis Colts were rated as the lousiest, ugliest bunch of losers in the NFL, that could at least be a perverse point of pride. But they can't even get that right, coming in at No. 31 in the power rankings, one notch above the Miami Dolphins at 32.

I try not to pay to much atention to sensational trials, but I confess to getting a little caught up in the Conrad Murray case. Even granting that Michael Jackson bore the primary responsibility for Michael Jackson's behavior, Murray comes across as an incredible sleazeball (or "person of low character" as I heard one commentator call him). He was paid more than $1 million a year to look after just one patient, and he was so busy using Jackson to impress bedable women that he couldn't even handle that:

Even though Burger King has dispatched its creepy mascot, we can still find strange fast-food ads. This is one from KFC I saw the other day, and I include it here in case you think I'm just a delusional rightwing Occupy Space hater. "What part of the chicken is the nugget?" says the ad. "Here, we sell popcorn chicken." Did not one person sitting around the ad-pitch table raise his little hand and ask, "But what part of the chicken is the popcorn?"

Amanda Knox is back home in Seattle after her four years in an Italian prison, and a scholar from New York University waxes eloquent for CNN: "There is something about pretty white girls, bloody knives and the slightest whiff of sex that gets the international news machine humming like nothing else." Gee, who knew? Apparently, the Knox saga has caused some in the media to go through one of their periodic bouts of pretend intrspection:

Heeey, Willlbur:

Animal-centric pics have performed well for Fox, so the Fox 2000 arm is putting its latest bet on a talking horse named, of course, "Mr. Ed."

Studio has acquired feature film rights to the beloved TV series, which aired on CBS from 1961 to 1966.